According to Putin’s propaganda, it is Europe that is freezing to death without Russian gas. More than 7% of the population lives in houses without heating. The peripheral regions have bigger problems. War expenses nullify any attempt to warm the body and soul of the country.
Moscow () – Official propaganda in Russia keeps repeating that Europeans are suffering from the cold due to the interruption of Russian gas supplies, not to mention the Ukrainians, whose power plants have been destroyed by Russian bombing. TV presenter Vladimir Solov’ev broadcasts information about “bureaucrats and deputies of EU institutions freezing in their offices.” On the 360tv channel they say that “the British freeze to death in bed” and Russia24 assures that “in Europe they try to warm themselves with primitive methods, feeding the stoves with straw.”
In reality, it is precisely the Russian citizens who are spending the winter in increasingly precarious conditions due to the lack of maintenance of the heating services, which require continuous attention and food, very poor at the moment. Russian teacher Irina Soshnikova from the Novgorod region in northern European Russia anguishedly pleads on her Facebook page: “Friends, for charity help me with firewood for heating! The machine for transporting and cutting wood costs more than 10,000 rubles [129 euros]and I can’t hire someone to bring the logs home and arrange them.”
Irina is 64 years old and lives in the village of Lyčkovo, in an old country house where no public service reaches, and used the pension of her elderly mother, now deceased, to buy firewood. Throughout 2022, spontaneous collections were organized through social networks to help the elderly and alone to get firewood, and the families of the reservists sent to Ukraine were promised help from the institutions, although all this is always insufficient.
In addition to the difficulties that city dwellers are experiencing due to the increasing number of failures in heating systems, it is precisely the large population in Russia’s outlying areas that is in crisis. Irina’s house hasn’t even been recognized as suitable, but she has nowhere else to go.
According to data from the 2020 national census, more than 7% of the Russian population lives in unheated houses and uses fireplaces and stoves. This means more than 10 million people. Even in the Caucasian republic of Adygeja, 1 in 10 people heat themselves with firewood, and the percentages are increasing towards the north, such as in the Kostroma, Novgorod and Karelia regions, on the border with Finland. Those who suffer the most are the inhabitants of Siberia and the Far East, where almost half of the families depend on stoves.
Often there is no public gas network, as in Tuva and Buryatia, where even with the necessary funds it is impossible to install autonomous heating. Home fires are very common in these areas. Already in August 2021 Tuva Governor Vladislav Kovalyg had personally asked Putin to include the region in the national gasification program. Fueling the stoves with coal, which is cheaper than wood, also means breathing toxic gases inside the house, leading to serious illnesses, but Gazprom countered that it would be too expensive to bring the gas to Tuva.
In Buryatia, local people have already asked Governor Aleksej Tsydenov for help several times because the wood supplied to the families of the many fallen in Ukraine is not enough for everyone and there are also no other forms of assistance.
Parents send their children to orphanages, where there is central heating, just to prevent them from freezing to death, because they have no money for firewood or coal, reports the Novosibirsk “Sun City” charitable foundation, which helps families with these kinds of difficulties. “Many think – says the director Marina Aksenova – that this is a generous aid from the State, but they do not realize that keeping children in these structures costs the community even more than the loads of wood that would be needed, in addition to of the separation and the psychological traumas that it produces in them”.
There are several associations that try to help Russian families in the winter cold, but the war expenses nullify any attempt to warm Russia’s body and soul.
